Interview with Abdul Rehman Tariq Butt at SolarWinds

TECHx

05-05-2025

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Abdul Rehman Tariq Butt, Regional Director – Middle East at SolarWinds, shares insights in this exclusive interview on the company's strategic direction in the region, innovations showcased at GISEC, and how SolarWinds is helping organizations tackle modern cybersecurity challenges with intelligence and agility.
How does SolarWinds' participation at GISEC align with its broader strategic goals in the Middle East?
As a leading cybersecurity focused exhibition, participating in GISEC enables us to showcase solutions that are helping redefine the digital landscape in UAE and beyond. It is also the ideal platform for us to engage with IT professionals from organizations of all industries and sizes that are looking for solutions to help manage their IT environments faster, address today's security challenges, and maximise the overall value IT provides to the business.
Can you share any new product introductions, collaborations, or key announcements SolarWinds is unveiling at GISEC?
Our portfolio is constantly evolving, and GISEC provides a great platform to highlight the latest innovations. Since our last appearance, we've made significant strides. We've expanded support to include a wider range of devices—especially SD-WAN nodes—to help customers accelerate their network modernisation efforts. We've also enhanced our multi-cloud capabilities with out-of-the-box support for Google Cloud Platform, alongside AWS and Azure. Most recently, in March, we strengthened our offering further with the acquisition of a solution focused on incident response and business continuity.
What specific challenges do enterprise IT environments face today, and how is SolarWinds equipped to address them?
AI is augmenting attacks that already plague organisanisations, making these more sophisticated and impactful.
At SolarWinds, we're constantly horizon scanning, and enhancing our portfolio to address the greatest challenges and opportunities enterprises face. Most recently, we made a significant acquisition specifically in the incident response space by acquiring Squadcast and its incident response technology. This allows us to provide customers with intelligent incident response capabilities that significantly reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). With Squadcast, organizations have achieved up to a 68% reduction in MTTR, saving thousands of work hours and nearly half a million dollars in costs.
In what ways is SolarWinds partnering with GCC governments and enterprises to strengthen cyber resilience?
The pace of digital transformation across the Middle East is accelerating—and we're proud to be right at the heart of it. What we're seeing on the ground is that hybrid cloud has firmly established itself as the model of choice. Organisations are increasingly seeking the flexibility to run workloads either on-premises or in the cloud, depending on their operational, regulatory, or performance needs. Security, control, and agility remain top priorities.
With our SolarWinds Observability platform, we give customers the freedom to operate across hybrid and multi-cloud environments—without compromising visibility. That kind of end-to-end insight is critical. Without it, organisations risk overlooking issues that can lead to performance bottlenecks, user dissatisfaction, or even downtime.
Another trend we're watching closely is the rush toward AI adoption. While there's immense potential, one of the biggest challenges we see is that many organisations are still grappling with how to apply AI meaningfully. Too often, AI is positioned as a checkbox feature—something added on, rather than integrated with purpose. A vendor might say, 'We offer AI,' but the real question is: how does that translate into business value?
At SolarWinds, we take a different approach. Our observability platform is built with AI by design—meaning our AIOps capabilities are embedded from the ground up, not bolted on after the fact. Using machine learning and holistic data insights, we help customers detect anomalies, pre-empt issues, and optimise system health across hybrid and cloud-native environments. Ultimately, we're enabling organisations to realise the true value of AI—empowering IT teams to do more with less, respond faster, and drive transformation with confidence.
How do you view the current evolution of the cybersecurity threat landscape across the MEA region?
We're seeing an uptick in the use of deepfakes and increasingly complex, multi-pronged attacks. While these tactics aren't entirely new, what's changed is the level of sophistication. Today's attackers are better resourced, continuously evolving, and leveraging AI-powered tools to refine their methods and maximise impact. It's a dynamic threat landscape that demands equally intelligent defence strategies.